


Sing of Strings

by Fault



Category: The Amazing Devil (Band)
Genre: Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Devils, Physics, Violins, Wood Between the Worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:06:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24622900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fault/pseuds/Fault
Summary: Wood has such character, when carved right. don't you think?Especially when it's a violin.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	Sing of Strings

Now, let's come to the instruments that bring forth the songs of The Amazing Devil. I don't mean the players, in this instance. I mean the physical musical instruments. 

First and foremost, the violin. Why foremost?

Have you ever heard that violins have a timbre closest to the human voice of any instrument? It's why it was so easy back in the day, to convince people that violin strings were made of cat gut like a witch's familiar, instead of the more mundane sheep intestines they were actually made of.

It's why the devil is frequently depicted playing fiddle. And we are speaking of The Amazing Devil, are we not? Played right, a violin can sound like the voice of a soul. Eerie and emotional and plaintive. Definitely otherworldly, ethereal.

Ethereal coming from the idea that all matter is permeated by a substance named ether. The closest we have to that idea now, is how the Higgs boson interacts with the fabric of reality to create gravity as we know it. If you believe that you understand gravity fully, you probably don't. If you believe you can feel it though, then you probably have functional senses. That is how ethereal works too, felt more than understood.

Violins have attracted attention of many sorts, since their invention. There are many physicists who’ve studied the voice of the violin, its vibration and tension, its overtones and fundaments. How the strings move when bowed and plucked. It’s violins that create what are known as Chladni patterns upon the wood. You can watch vibration propagate through the elasticity of grain, making all the tiny dust particles dance into the correct patterns for the pitch of the note, pushed by unseen forces in the air. Like the ashes of hearts dancing to music, like tiny folk dancers in curving lines.

Did you know that when a note’s overtone harmonics pull it apart into unstable chaos, it’s known as a wolf note? Evocative, don’t you think? Especially when the bridge that carries the string’s vibration into the resonant body of the violin is carved of deer bone, as this one's is. Carved from a red deer, I believe, but don't ask me how, the tools for that sort of bone work make me shudder to think of.

But we were talking about singing, strings, and souls. 

Oh, wait... that wasn’t really a digression, now was it?

The violin in question is of an unusual make in other ways. Carved in the lean years of the 1930s, in the North of England, any further North, or higher and colder, and you’d be treading the highlands. Carved out of local wood and hope and quiet fears, by a man who had carved many such before, in better times, with more light and warmth. This was carved in a harsh winter, the wood stiff and unwilling unless bathed in warm firelight. Macabre, in a way to carve the flesh of trees, by the burning light of otherd. 

No Norway Maple and Ebony for this one. Nothing exotic to the Isles. This one is blackthorn and dog oak, polished deep. The waving grain on the body of a violin is known as the flame. This one's flame will show you things, if you know how to look through the polish just so, and listen to the static potential for vibrato and squeal. If you can watch its voice bring pictures to life.

One of the blackthorn pegs broke once, a knurl of grain that didn't last the test of time and song. A replacement was carved by the contemporary player, out of yew. It's believed that choice was for the pun of it: yew for a ewe string. But yew is also the wood of midwinter. Blackthorn, the wood of Samhain. This violin’s bones know the cold and the dark, more than any other I've seen. More than most players have seen. 

The original bow was strung with white horsehair, a powerful talisman for passage to Tir na Nog, I'll have you know. A talisman it carried for more than four score years, through countless songs, countless melodies and lyrics. Countless transports of hearts from this realm to another, distant and silent as tears on a cheek. Time enough to build opinions upon this world and that. To feel the damp and the light, darkness and bright. The cling of fungus trying to break through the polish, and failing. More dust to dance in unseen places. In the unbreathing lungs of the violin's body. This violin knows things that I daren't hear too much of. 

It does not get played with a bow of white horsehair any more. I have not inquired too deeply about the current bow, lest I become an accomplice. There are whispers of sharp knives and drowned souls, lost lovers and animals that have not tread the earth for an age. The eyelashes of gods and the toe-hairs of devils. The remains of a fishing line that pulled a mermaid to shore, and the tough fibres from laver grown in a ships graveyard. Enough to make your hair stand on end. 

Don't you find it deliciously dark that we make a violin sing by rubbing the dried blood of one tree against the lacquered bones of another? Rosin can come from a number of trees. You'd have to smell this one to know for sure. Add in the catgut strings and the horsehair bow and really, a violin is quite the Frankenstein's orchestra. I posit that there's no better instrument to accompany the event, should you wish to lose your virginity in a cemetary on top of your mother's grave; but if I speak truly, I haven't actually asked Mary Shelley for her opinion on that.

Well... I've spoken of the body and the bridge, the rosin and bow, the peg and neck and polished glow... One last piece that deserves mention, I believe. One last new addition.

The Strings. The original sheep gut strings were replaced and replaced, played so long and to so many purposes that human sweat is just part of the polish, the rosin worn into the cracks. Those strings are etched into the voice of the violin as it is now, like footprints in the wood. But these days, these days, the strings are of iron alloy. Metal core and binding. The violin now does as it's bid. 

Mostly. 

But that’s another tale.


End file.
